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I think Ousterhout’s pragmatic definition of complexity is the best one when discussing actual code bases: complexity is anything that makes the system hard to
by mbrock 7y ago
I think Ousterhout’s pragmatic definition of complexity is the best one when discussing actual code bases: complexity is anything that makes the system hard to change, taking into account how often the relevant part needs to change.
- frou_dh 7y agoHard to change is subjective. Maybe something you found hard to change, your colleague would have no trouble with. And vice versa.
- rob74 7y agoYeah, some colleagues have absolutely no trouble changing any code... and then it starts breaking for some edge cases that they weren't aware of :D
- mbrock 7y agoYeah, with this definition, complexity is something you notice as a working team, not something you can directly measure with syntactic criteria (of course syntactic criteria may correlate with the complexity).